Hi, first time poster. I took a number of the photographs displayed above during the Open House New York tour, which was FASCINATING. An amazing, amazing building and an amazing, amazing transformation it's undergoing. I've posted more pictures an my write up of the tour/experience surrounding the building here:

Moynihan Station development office to be folded into the Port Authority

Juliette Michaelson
October 19, 2011

Quote:

In nominating Pat Foye to be Executive Director of the Port Authority, Gov. Andrew Cuomo also called for consolidating the Moynihan Station Development Corporation - the state agency in charge of developing the new train station - into the Port Authority.

The Port Authority has been involved with Moynihan Station since early 2010, when Gov. Paterson charged it to manage the construction of the station hand in hand with MSDC.

A full transfer to the PA and the likely dissolution of MSDC makes sense as the project moves into a construction phase. (The PA has more experience managing construction than MSDC, most recently at the World Trade Center). A construction management team was recently hired, and construction bids from several prequalified bidders were solicited earlier this month. Bids are due back in early December, and work would begin in the late winter.

In addition to the PA's construction-management experience, the Authority might also be able to provide more funding to Moynihan Station than cash-strapped New York State.

By naming one of his deputies to run the Port Authority yesterday and putting the agency in charge of building an expanded Moynihan Station in Midtown, Gov. Andrew Cuomo put another footprint in the center of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New York City.

In a statement, Cuomo said taking Moynihan Station away from the Empire State Development Corp. and putting it into the hands of the Port Authority was simply a matter of fiscal prudence. The Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which is still disbursing federal aid downtown, will also be subsumed into the Port Authority.

“Too many different agencies doing the same or closely related work makes little sense,” Cuomo said. “The Port Authority is best situated to oversee the development at Moynihan Station and the orderly wind down of the LMDC and these changes will consolidate responsibility within the Authority.”

__________________NEW YORK. World's capital.

“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.

Moynihan Station development office to be folded into the Port Authority

That's good news! Hopefully this is just a first step toward PA control over the whole of Penn Station. One of the worst things about Penn is that it's divvied up between LIRR, NJT and Amtrak who all seem intent on making it more maze-like. Each agency remodels their particular fiefdom in a different style than the others and there's even a hallway (the Hilton corridor) that none of them claim and hasn't been renovated since before MSG was built above.

Moynihan envisioned creating a new, sweeping concourse across the street in the Farley Post Office, which was a companion structure to the original Penn Station. This new station would be a more appropriate gateway to New York than the current Penn Station. We agree with that in theory. But let's face facts. The big push is for a foyer, a gateway, nothing more. In case elected and appointed officials on both sides of the Hudson River have missed the news flash: The golden age of railroading is long gone.

What we hoped was also long gone was the Port Authority's assumption of projects that have nothing to do with its core mission. Right now, commuters are eating a substantial toll hike on the George Washington Bridge.

Memo to Governor Christie: Tell Cuomo, Port Authority Chairman David Samson (your appointee) and Foye to get the hell out of a rail station that serves Amtrak, NJ Transit and the Long Island Rail Road. If New York wants a foyer, let them find the money elsewhere. Perhaps even private money.

As distinguished as his accomplishments are, Patrick Foye, chosen by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo last week to run the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, has never undertaken a challenge like this. Few people have.

But the Port Authority brings with it an entirely different level of responsibility. It's massive in both size and scope, ranging through two states and combining five airports, two tunnels, four bridges, the PATH transit system, 10 real estate developments, a large maritime shipping operation and a police force. The Port Authority Foye oversees will be broader than the one his predecessor, Chris Ward, is leaving, because Cuomo also announced the agency will take over the Moynihan train station project, near Penn Station, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.

Putting these under the auspices of the Port Authority makes sense. The conversion of the Farley Post Office into Moynihan Station to provide new access to the trains underneath is essentially a construction challenge, and building is what the authority does best.

__________________NEW YORK. World's capital.

“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.

When Rangers fans enter Madison Square Garden on Thursday for the first sports event at the newly renovated arena, they will find better sightlines, some upper-bowl seats seemingly cantilevered over the ice, interior corridors at least twice the width of the narrow old ones, luxury suites that look like Manhattan apartments, many more restrooms — in short, a vastly improved building.

But for John Tortorella, the Rangers’ always pithy coach, architectural niceties are of secondary importance. “What makes a building good is winning in it,” he said Wednesday.

The Rangers will finally play in New York after opening the season on a 16,000-mile trip, perhaps the longest undertaken by an N.H.L. team. (The Canucks traveled 13,000 miles while their home rink was reconfigured for the 2010 Olympics.)

After 36 days that took the Rangers from the Atlantic Ocean to the Baltic Sea, back across the Atlantic and on to the Pacific, then back to the Atlantic again, they are, in the words of their captain, Ryan Callahan, “excited to be home.”

"Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves.
Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean.
We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture.
And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed."

- "Farewell to Penn Station," New York Times editorial, October 30, 1963 (as found on nyc-architecture.com)

Another potentially enormous project, the expansion of Pennsylvania Station into the Farley Post Office building just to the west, would add as much as 750,000 square feet of retail in the Beaux Arts building.

The project, to be named in honor of late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, would create a new retail destination to bookend vibrant West 34th Street. However, it's by no means certain. Vornado and Related, which partnered to strike a deal with the state in 2006 to develop the retail, face a year-end deadline to solidify the financial terms.

Furthermore, three avenues to the east are two malls that provide cautionary tales to retailers. The Manhattan Mall and the Herald Center, both within spitting distance of Macy's on Sixth Avenue at 34th Street, were reimagined in the 1980s, but failed and were recreated in scaled-down forms again in subsequent years.

Yet in the project's favor is the massive amount of commuter foot traffic in the area. In 2010, Penn Station was the busiest transportation facility in the country, with 600,000 passengers daily.

The first phase of the project broke ground last fall and focuses on the transportation infrastructure. The retail post office will remain in place on the Eighth Avenue side of the building, with new entrances for commuters to ease congestion into Penn Station.

The retail development -- which Vornado and Related are doing with the property owner, Empire State Development Corporation, and in consultation with the Port Authority -- is part of the project's second phase, which could include a hotel or other amenities. That has not yet started.

One set of plans from the state's Moynihan Station Development Corporation shows a possible street-level layout with seven spaces comprising more than 106,000 square feet of retail, including blocks of "destination retail" on the Ninth Avenue side of the building. It also shows blocks of up to 50,000 square feet on other levels in the six-story building.

"That is a great building," Grayson said, referring to the 1912 McKim, Mead & White icon.

"It starts with heritage. If you put [in] the right kind of tenant, it can be really exciting," he said, pointing to examples in historic buildings such as Chelsea Market.

Over the past decade and a half, spurred on first by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and later by supporters who wanted to continue his efforts, well-connected New Yorkers have fought for an expansion of Penn Station into the Farley Post Office. Part of their reasoning is to boost train service and ease customer congestion underneath Madison Square Garden while the rest of their efforts are driven by the idea of a Great Public Work. Penn Station, they rightfully say, is an eye sore. It’s dirt, dingy and ugly, and the post office would provide a setting of grandeur that could right the wrong of destroying the original Beaux Arts building.

To that end, the project has been divided into two parts. Phase 1 includes better egress points into the current Penn Station, and it is currently funded and ongoing. Phase 2, which will cost upwards of $1 billion, involves moving Amtrak’s operations into the Moynihan Station area and perhaps readying the station for high-speed rail if the stars and money align properly. That is more of a dream right now than anything else....

For Amtrak to move more passengers on trains between Washington and Boston, its only profitable route, it must move out of New York’s Penn Station, said Drew Galloway, assistant vice president for the eastern region. The new space it covets is across the street, where New York state and two developers plan to transform the 97-year-old James A. Farley Post Office into a $1 billion train hall and retail complex.

The rub: Officials at U.S. taxpayer-subsidized Amtrak, which lost $1.3 billion last fiscal year, say they can’t afford to leave Penn Station, which the railroad owns, unless their new home is effectively rent-free. With the development’s finances unresolved, New York officials haven’t made guarantees. “Either we are able to expand the station capacity to accommodate more passengers, or we can’t expand the service on the corridor,” Galloway said. “It’s that simple.”

Other potential sources of project funding have dried up or face constraints. Congress last month killed the fiscal 2012 budget for President Barack Obama’s high-speed rail program and cut Amtrak’s annual subsidy by $65 million. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is managing construction for the state, raised tolls in August by 56 percent over five years to shore up its budget. The real estate developers will spend money on the project after negotiating final terms with the state, Timothy Gilchrist, president of Moynihan Station Development Corp., a unit of New York state’s business-investment agency, said in an interview.

__________________NEW YORK. World's capital.

“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.

Nearly a half-century has passed since the destruction of the great 1910 station designed by Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White, a “monumental act of vandalism,” as an editorial in The New York Times called the demolition in 1963. It was replaced by Penn Plaza and Madison Square Garden, Modernist mediocrities, erected to serve real estate interests, with a new subterranean Penn Station entombed below.

Some 600,000 commuters, riding Amtrak, Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit, now suffer Penn Station every day. That makes it probably the busiest transit hub in the Western world, busier than Heathrow Airport in London, busier than Newark, La Guardia and Kennedy airports combined. To pass through Grand Central Terminal, one of New York’s exalted public spaces, is an ennobling experience, a gift. To commute via the bowels of Penn Station, just a few blocks away, is a humiliation.

...the only way to fix Penn properly is to move Madison Square Garden.

Why? Because the open secret about the Moynihan plan is that Amtrak alone would move across Eighth Avenue. Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit and the subways wouldn’t budge. And only 30,000 of those 600,000 people who use Penn Station each day take Amtrak, never mind all the subway riders passing through.

We have become a city too cynical about big change, resigned to the impossibility of unraveling bureaucratic entanglements, beholden to private interests, inured to commercialism and compromise.

We depend on developers to improve neighborhoods, and at the same time we waste unconscionable amounts of public money on architectural follies like the much-delayed World Trade Center PATH station, which is projected, even after ground zero is fully developed, to serve only perhaps 60,000 riders and whose exploding cost is already approaching $4 billion, a scandal still waiting to dawn on New Yorkers.

But demolishing the Javits Center also presents a possible solution to Penn Station. The thought is: Move Madison Square Garden to the southern end of the Javits site, at 34th Street and 11th Avenue. That is a prime location in what is hoped to become the busy intersection of a new Midtown South. The state, in conjunction with the city, would provide the Garden’s owners with a turnkey, or at least a very generous, deal: a new riverfront arena, partly financed by the substantial air rights gained in return for acquiring the Garden’s present site. The new arena, unlike the current Garden, would compete as an up-to-date sports and entertainment center with the one rising at Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.

__________________NEW YORK. World's capital.

“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.

At the end of the day, the non transferable air rights that currently occupy the block that houses Penn Station and MSG are way too valuable to be left undeveloped.

Unfortunately the Dolans opted for a renovation as opposed to a move and a new arena. But with the snow ball pace of the convention center deal, the immense value of that real estate as residential, or mixed use of some sort, and the fact that MSG just finished their renovations, I really doubt that the timing would line up for the garden to move to where the Javits is now.

With that in mind, a move to the Farley Post Office seems to be the most logical place. The Far West Side where the Javits Center is now, will develop into a great neighborhood on its own because of the immense amount of park space that will be built, some of which is under construction now. But that stretch along 9th Avenue could really use a boost like a new arena.

I just hope the Dolans realize that the Far West Side/Javits Center site, and the Farley Post Office Building could be their last real opportunities to relocate to a prime site within Manhattan. But given that it's the Dolans, I'm expecting the worse, which is for them to stay put.

At the end of the day, the non transferable air rights that currently occupy the block that houses Penn Station and MSG are way too valuable to be left undeveloped.

Unfortunately the Dolans opted for a renovation as opposed to a move and a new arena. But with the snow ball pace of the convention center deal, the immense value of that real estate as residential, or mixed use of some sort, and the fact that MSG just finished their renovations, I really doubt that the timing would line up for the garden to move to where the Javits is now.

With that in mind, a move to the Farley Post Office seems to be the most logical place. The Far West Side where the Javits Center is now, will develop into a great neighborhood on its own because of the immense amount of park space that will be built, some of which is under construction now. But that stretch along 9th Avenue could really use a boost like a new arena.

I just hope the Dolans realize that the Far West Side/Javits Center site, and the Farley Post Office Building could be their last real opportunities to relocate to a prime site within Manhattan. But given that it's the Dolans, I'm expecting the worse, which is for them to stay put.

Well, it's quite clear that they won't be moving for decades now unless somebody comes along with some major deal to these owners. They pumped hundreds of millions into this renovation, so the city blew its chance to make a deal last time. I don't see them ever moving to the Javitz area.

I'm so sickened by this waste of an opportunity. This article is years too late. I remember little outcry about Penn when they were planning that last deal and very little public interest or hype about it. Why bother writing this now?

He's right though, the Farley is a poor excuse for a restoration of Penn since it will only process a small percentage of people. They better do something to improve the dungeon that is Penn if this is the way it's going to be for decades.

Is there no other way they could open it up by demolishing another building or digging up roads?

How about building a new station adjacent to the tracks on another block and have passageways connecting this new headhouse with the platforms for LIRR/NJT?

Does anybody know if the original Penn had platforms/tracks open to the light? If not, all we need is a decent head-house for all to make up for the loss.

Also, why don't they just take over the entire Farley building and use it for everything, not just amtrak.. it appears big enough if the annex is incorporated, no?